Planning the peri-urban green city: local regulations of private gardens in the Paris region
Résumé
In contrast to community gardens or parks, private gardens have until only recently been little studied by
social sciences despite their important socioecological value: due to their large aggregated surface in urban
areas, they contribute significantly to maintaining urban biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and ecosystem
services. They have also been shown to be valuable for human wellbeing and health, and by providing
contact with the living environment, they are a means of connecting urban dwellers with nature.
Among the understudied peri-urban gardens, vegetable gardens are a particularly neglected category. They
have been overlooked by government agencies and non-governmental organizations and understudied by
academics. However, interest in vegetable gardens is suddenly increasing. Following the COVID-19
outbreak, many people confined to their homes began or resumed gardening, with a particular interest in
growing fruits and vegetables. In France, the largest online plant seller indicated that its sale of vegetable
plants and seeds increased by 3.5-fold during the lockdown of spring 2020 and that one in ten customers
started a vegetable garden for the very first time during this period.
We present selected results from a sociological inquiry on planning regulations of gardens, conducted within
a multidisciplinary research project, mobilizing approaches from ecology, sociology, and geography to study
peri-urban gardens in an integrative way. Our study is based on the quantitative analysis of a sample of
municipal land-use plans in the Paris region, completed by qualitative interviews with local stakeholders. We
show that local planning policies may have an impact on the frequency, dimension and typology of gardens.
Local choices made by planning authorities at a very local level may conduct to heterogeneous situations in
terms of regulations that may foster, or by contrast, hinder garden preservation.